On Octo­ber 7, Pres­i­dent Evo Morales issued a gov­ern­ment decree that allows work­ers to estab­lish “social enter­prises” in busi­nesses that are bank­rupt, wind­ing up, or unjus­ti­fi­ably closed or aban­doned. These enter­prises, while pri­vate, will be oper­ated by the work­ers and qual­ify for gov­ern­ment assistance.

Morales issued Supreme Decree 1754 at a cer­e­mony in the pres­i­den­tial palace mark­ing the 62nd anniver­sary of the found­ing of the Con­fed­eración Gen­eral de Tra­ba­jadores Fab­riles de Bolivia (CGTFB – the Gen­eral Con­fed­er­a­tion of Indus­trial Work­ers of Bolivia). The Min­is­ter of Labour, Daniel San­talla, said the decree was issued pur­suant to arti­cle 54 of Bolivia’s new Con­sti­tu­tion, which states that workers

“in defense of their work­places and pro­tec­tion of the social inter­est may, in accor­dance with the law, reac­ti­vate and reor­ga­nize firms that are under­go­ing bank­rupty, cred­i­tor pro­ceed­ings or liq­ui­da­tion, or closed or aban­doned with­out jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and may form com­mu­ni­tar­ian or social enter­prises. The state will con­tribute to the action of the workers.”

In his remarks to the audi­ence of sev­eral hun­dred union mem­bers and lead­ers, Pres­i­dent Morales noted that employ­ers often attempt to black­mail work­ers with threats to shut down when faced with demands for higher wages.

“Now, if they threaten you in that way, the firm may as well go bank­rupt or close, because you will become the own­ers. They will be new social enter­prises,” he said.

Labour Min­is­ter San­talla noted that the con­sti­tu­tional arti­cle had already been used to estab­lish some firms, such as Ena­tex, Instra­bol, and Tra­bol­tex, and that more such firms could now be set up under the new decree.

Busi­ness spokes­men pre­dictably warned that the new pro­vi­sions would be a dis­in­cen­tive to pri­vate invest­ment and risk the via­bil­ity of com­pa­nies.

San­talla also said that firms that do not com­ply with their work­force oblig­a­tions under the law will lose pref­er­en­tial mech­a­nisms to export their prod­ucts to state-​managed mar­kets. And he cited some recent cases in which the gov­ern­ment had inter­vened in defense of work­ers vic­tim­ized for their attempts to form unions. In one such case last month, Burger King, the com­pany was fined 30,000 Boli­vianos ($4,300US), ordered to rein­state the fired work­ers and to rec­og­nize the union.

In the fol­low­ing arti­cle Alfredo Rada, Bolivia’s Deputy Min­is­ter of Coor­di­na­tion with the Social Move­ments, draws atten­tion to some impor­tant devel­op­ments within the country’s labour move­ment and sug­gests some means by which the unions can be more effec­tively incor­po­rated within the “process of change” being cham­pi­oned by the gov­ern­ment of the MAS-​IPSP, the Move­ment for Social­ism – Polit­i­cal Instru­ment for the Sov­er­eignty of the Peo­ples.